May 2010 Archives

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Can someone please explain this?, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

Everybody tells you it's going to happen, but as a parent, you can't really imagine how it works. One minute she's five, graduating from pre-kindergarten, then the next minute she's 17, going to the junior prom.

Albany Fire Department 1901 from All Over Albany on Vimeo.

Boardman and Gray 1905, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

Some may have noticed that I've been guest-blogging on history over at my favorite local website, All Over Albany. This week's article: the piano-making boom of Albany.

First Church, Albany, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

First Church, the Dutch Reformed Church in Albany, dates to 1642, making it the oldest church in upstate and one of the very oldest in the country. This building dates to 1799, when the congregation moved from the stone church at Broadway and State Street to the outskirts of town, at Clinton and Pearl.

Berkeley Commercial Photo negative sleeve.jpg, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

Handle Negatives by edges ONLY. They scratch and fingerprint easily.

"Daddy, what are negatives?"

Mimeographing 1940, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

Mimeographing services. For decades, mimeographing reigned supreme as the cheap, easy way to make quality copies of printed materials, and every office of any size had one. A typist would set up a stencil, which would then be attached to a spinning drum. Ink would be squeezed through the stencil and onto the sheet of paper. They're now often confused in our nostalgic minds with dittos, the fragrant medium of school tests that also went by the name of "spirit duplicators." Dittos worked more like offset, with a mirror-image wax-coated master that printed where the wax wasn't, usually in a purple ink. Both technologies suffered a bit from the rise of the Xerox-style photocopier, but were truly put to death by personal computers and printers. They are still in use in the developing world, apparently because they don't require electricity.

You don't see a lot of typewriting services, either. And the bottom dropped right out of the multigraphing market.

Thruway sign remnant 2.jpg, originally uploaded by carljohnson.

I noticed that this old sign for the Thruway, probably going back to the '60s when I-890 was built a couple of miles away, was still surviving at the corner of Nott St. and Maxon Rd., even during the construction of the new Golub building, but I thought for certain it would disappear when the construction was complete. It had stood watch there, oddly far from any easy access to the Thruway and not really on a major access way, since the time when there was a Wetson's hamburgers across the street, since the Big N existed. I thought for sure the redevelopment of the block, more than 30 years after the Big N went out of business, would finally mean that this sign's time had come. But someone must have decided it belonged there still, even without any directional arrow, for they went to the effort of cutting off the top of the pole but leaving the rest for the sign's perch.

The site has changed dramatically since Google Street View last visited, but two opposing views of this corner offer an interesting pair of perspectives:

Now you see it.

Now you don't.